Are You Setting Yourself Up For Failure

The Situation: My job entails a lot of travel and that has resulted in me amassing a decent number of miles on an airlines frequent flier program. A few weeks back, I got an email from the airline announcing that they will equip their aircrafts with wi-fi and if I downloaded an app, I shall be able to have access to an array of inflight entertainment options. I love watching movies. This was exciting news for me as it gave me an opportunity to catch up on movies that I had missed watching when they originally screened. So, excitedly, I […]

Right Data at the Right Time to the Right People

Today I was travelling from Bangalore to Mumbai on an airline. I had a upgrade voucher that I used and got upgraded to Business Class. As soon as the flight took off, I realized that 6 of the 16 business class seats were un-occupied. That is such a waste of opportunity. The airline could have used this opportunity to delight at least 6 of their loyal customers. All the airline had to do was the following: Include the Frequent flier status/miles of the passengers in their manifesto. Once the boarding is completed and if there are vacant seats in the […]

Customer Engagement: Ideas for Airlines to Improve Customer Engagement

The airline industry has been notoriously infamous about the poor customer experience and engagement. This has also played a big part on the overall profitability of the industry. The only airlines that are making profits are the one’s that have some semblance of good customer experience going. If you take flights for work on a regular basis, you will agree that we spend enormous amounts of time reaching the airport, at the airport (both at the destination & the origin), on-board the aircraft and the drive away from the airports. So, I thought what could the airlines do to help […]

Travel booking sites are destroying the airline industry..

The proliferation of travel booking sites like (travelocity, expedia, makemytrip, cleartrip, Yatra, etc) have reduced the airline industry to an industry competing purely on price and this is telling on the profitability of the industry. This so happens as price is the easiest way to compare multiple airlines. That coupled with the fact that most of the ticket bookings happen on these sites provides them with too much influence over the airline carriers and sets off the negative spiral of lower and lower prices for sectors. Result is that almost all the players in the industry are in the red. The airlines […]

Why Airlines need to re-design their loyalty programs

Today, I was reading an article “Why Airlines Need to Reconsider What “Loyalty” Is Today…”. This brought back a few questions to my mind. I work for an MNC and my work involves a lot of travel within India. My company has a corporate deal with an airline (Jet Airways) in India to minimize the cost of travel. So, most of the times, I am required to take a Jet Air flight. I do not like flying Jet but do travel quite a bit in Jet due to the company policy. The company also allows me the freedom to choose […]